What Are You Wearing?

Her name, she said, was Nicole. She called me randomly one night in a Texas hotel room, and she wanted to have phone sex. I obliged. And obliged, and obliged. A year later, Nicole and I decided to meet face-to-face. In retrospect, maybe not the best move

Late one cold, wet November night a couple of years ago, maybe 3 a.m., I was sitting on my bed in a Motel 6 just south of Austin, Texas, brushing my teeth and watching the closing moments of a college basketball game on ESPN2 that had been played earlier that night but was being rebroadcast and whose outcome was still a mystery to me, when the phone on the night table besides me jangled to life.

Who could possibly be calling? Nobody knew I was there; I'd arrived only an hour earlier. It had to be the old Pakistani guy down in the motel office, I figured, or else my little brother, Peter, whom I was traveling with; he'd gone out walking down the service road, looking for better reception on his cellie so he could call his girlfriend. After the third ring, I picked up.

"Hello?"

There was a silence, then a woman's voice, half whispering. "Hey there."

"Um…hi."

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"Well," I said. "I'm watching the Providence-Niagara game. I think it might go into overtime. Who is this, by the way?"

"I'm Nicole." I could hear the push of her breath on the other end of the line, as though her mouth was pressed close to the receiver. I went to the window, peered through the curtains—the parking lot was dark and still. Was this someone's idea of a joke? Maybe so, but I was just that bored and lonely enough to play along.

"Hi, Nicole. My name's Davy."

"I like that name" she said.

"Yeah, it's a…uh, it's a good name. Listen, where are you?"

"I'm in your motel." The room seemed to slowly whirl backward, like a carnival ride catching speed. "What are you wearing?"

"Well," I said. "I've got on gray mesh basketball shorts with, let's see, three thin white stripes down each side, and a Bell's Pizza T-shirt." I was quiet for a second, then rushed to fill the silence. "It's blue. I used to deliver for Bell's Pizza. We made these shirts for our rec-league basketball team. Hey, I've got a question for you. Can I ask you a question? What are you wearing?"

"No-thing," she breathed.

There was a stirring in my gray mesh basketball shorts with the three thin white stripes down each side. Nicole explained that she'd hit the bars all night with her friends, and that now they were drunk and passed out and she was bored. "Pretend you're here with me," she said. "I want to tell you what we would do."

I'd never had phone sex before. Not that I was opposed to it—it was just one of those things that never came up. I guess it had always seemed sort of strange and silly to me. Real sex was so much more appealing. And in times when that was hard to come by, well, that's what the stack of Victoria's Secret catalogs crammed behind the books on my bookshelf was for, along with a 1988 Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition with Elle Macpherson on the cover and battered VHS copies of 9 ½ Weeks and Basic Instinct (my good stash had been lost in a move).

Nicole's dirty talk was both ridiculous and oddly arousing. But I couldn't shake the thought that this was all being recorded, that in the parking lot, staked out in the back of an ice cream truck that had been pimped into a mobile surveillance unit, friends of mine were listening in, wide-eyed and gleeful, headphones clamped to their ears. It was hard to be serious. "Nicole," I said. "I'm grabbing onto your titties! I'm kissing you with reckless abandon! I'm pumping in and out of you, like, well…well, like an oil derrick! Or a piston? I'm the sword, baby, and you're the scabbard!"

Finally, I grew less bashful and got into it for real, and in a few minutes there was a happy ending. We said good night. The basketball game on the TV had ended long before, and I had no idea who'd won.

At seven thirty the next morning, the phone rang again, jarring me awake; my brother, too. He lifted his head from the pillow. "Who the fuck is calling?" he said.

It was Nicole. "Girl," I said, "I'm sleeping. Don't you know what time it is?" I was about to hang up, but then, remembering our little moment a few hours before, I softened. "Look, here's my cell number. Call me later, okay?"

···

A few months earlier, in May 2004, I'd published a book called Found and hit the road with Peter for an eight-month, 136-city tour. At each event, I read from my book and Peter played guitar and sang. We burned from one city to the next in a 1999 Dodge van we'd bought on eBay. Mostly, we crashed on sofas and floors at friends' houses or stayed with folks we'd met that night at our show, though sometimes we'd take turns driving through till dawn while the other slept in the backseat, which folded down into a bed. It was actually so comfortable, a lot of nights I chose to sleep out in the van rather than on a stranger's sagging couch. Once a month or so, dusted from the road, we'd splurge on some sad-sack hotel, like that Motel 6 on the outskirts of Austin. That night Nicole found me, Peter and I had been on the road for six months; we were about a hundred cities into the tour.

Three nights later, in Oklahoma City, I was getting ready for bed out in the van when my cell phone rang. PRIVATE CALLER, it said. It was Nicole. She was still whispering. "What's up with the whispering?" I asked. She said her roommates were sleeping in the next room. We chatted for a few minutes, then got into the phone sex again. She told me she was tonguing my balls. This time I went Shakespeare: "Oh baby, wherefore art thy labia?" Afterward, she was about to hang up, but I said, "Nicole, that's so impersonal. If the fantasy is that we're having sex, I don't want to just zip up my pants the second we're done and leave. Can't we just talk for a bit? You know, cuddle?"

···

I was curious about Nicole. Now that we'd had sex a couple of times, I wanted to know what she was all about—I wanted to know where she worked; I wanted to know what she was into (besides having phone sex with strangers); I wanted to know what kind of person calls hotel rooms to have phone sex with strangers. She told me she'd studied psychology at the University of North Texas and that now she worked as a nurse at an old-age home in Waco; she'd just been down in Austin visiting friends. She also told me that her mother had passed away recently and that she'd been having a tough time with it—they'd been especially close.

The next few times we talked, she was still whispering, which was starting to seem a little suspicious. She said her boyfriend was studying just outside her bedroom door. I got a little freaked out—was this a guy I'd been talking to?

"Nicole, what the fuck? I said. "Just talk out loud for a second so I can hear your real voice." She refused. Still, she seemed like a girl—there'd been a few times when I thought I'd heard her real voice, times when she laughed, times when she moaned. So I went ahead and had phone sex with her anyway.

···

Houston, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, Tampa—Nicole and I skittered across the South; it was like Badlands for the new millennium (less killing, more "anytime minutes"). Every few nights, I'd be out in the van after a show, making my bed in the backseat, when Nicole would call, and we'd get hot and heavy. I was still wary that this was all some crazy prank by my friends and that our calls were being recorded, so during phone sex I kept things tongue-in-check, as though hamming it up for an audience. Nicole would be talking dirty, telling me how she wanted to squeeze my dick with her pussy, and I'd just start riffing on some goofy shit: There was NASCAR-themed pillow talk ("Straddle my throttle, Nicole. Take me to the checkered flag!"), and then sometimes I'd do it up in a stiff, upper-crust British accent ("Oh, God save the queen. I'm coming, I'm coming, tea and crumpets for all!"), and then other times, I performed in the voice of a black comedian making fun of the way white people talk, over-pronouncing each word ("Oh yes, baby, golly gee, keep licking my penis, that just feels absolutely stupendous!"). Only irony could distance me from the sad truth of what I was really doing: jacking off in the back of my van in a Taco Bell parking lot in Jefferson City, Missouri, while talking on my headset to someone who was possibly a man.

My brother gave me shit for it. "I can't believe you still talk to that dude," he said.

"It's not a dude," I said.

Over the phone, Nicole definitely had the resigned spirit of a woman who'd had a lot of attention from guys in high school but then, knocked around by life, had slid hopelessly overweight. It was weird that she was always whispering, though. A couple of times, I told Nicole it was over unless she talked out loud so I could be sure she was a girl. She refused, and for the next week I wouldn't answer her calls. Then I'd relent. One time I even asked a girl I met at one of the Found readings for details of what happens on the visit to the gynecologist, then asked Nicole the same thing. "It's uncomfortable," she whispered. "They come at you with that speculum—it's like a medieval torture device." I pressed her to continue, but she wasn't going to pay these games with me. Speculum? Ten out of ten male friends I polled had no idea what that was. Surely she was a she. But why disguise her voice? It was maddening.

Ultimately, this is what I told myself: Phone sex was really about the power of the imagination, and in that case I could imagine her to be whomever I wanted. It wasn't hard to imagine her as Fiona Apple's double.

···

Our relationship deepened. My phone had a special ring for Private Caller, and since Nicole was the only one who rang like that, I could tell when she was calling. I started looking forward to her calls. I dropped the funny guises and just talked to her genuinely. Sometimes we'd talk for half an hour before phone sex. Out in my van after a long night in Phoenix or Des Moines, I'd be lonely, drunk, and depressed, and tell her about my problems. Nicole was a great listener, willing to indulge each tangent of every story she was told. She was as curious about my life as I was about hers. In a fucked-up way, this was the closest I'd had to a real girlfriend in years. And the more we got to know each other, the more the sex improved. Nicole was insatiable. She started calling me every day, a half hour before my reading, when she knew I'd be out in the van getting my notes ready. "Hey, Davy," she'd breathe, "how 'bout a quickie?"

···

In December the book tour ended, and I resumed a more regular kind of life—staying put in Michigan, playing basketball twice a week at the rec center, sleeping in my own bed. For the most part, I stopped answering Nicole's calls. I was busy, and I was dating real girls—real in that they were in the flesh in front of me, and real in that they were unquestionably biological girls. But I also felt bad that I'd left Nicole in the lurch, and on occasion I'd still have a late-night phone visit with her. We were like those couples who break up but still end up sleeping together every once in a while. Then, one day, her number was no longer in service. Nicole was gone.

···

A few months ago, my van broke down on the freeway near my house, and as I waited for a tow and the bitter cold edged in, I started playing that game I play when I'm feeling lonely, the one where I review all of my prior relationships, marveling that so many sweet, smart, pretty girls have come into my life and that I've found a way to fuck things up with every one of them. This game usually ends with me calling two or three of my es and leaving miserable voicemails on their cell phones or their machines at home. Inevitably, one of their new beaus calls back to say, "Hey man, I got your message. Emilie's down in Chile for two weeks, but you sounded really down…. I just wanted to call and make sure you were doing all right."

That night, on the shoulder of I-94, big rigs howling past, I thought of Nicole. We'd had kind of a nice connection, hadn't we? All the funny and sad stories she'd told me about working at the nursing home flooded my mind, along with her reminiscences of her mom, and I got the urge to track her down and meet her, find out who the fuck she was. I knew she might be 400 pounds or my grandma's age, or a guy, but there was also a possibility that she was, well, hot. So I tried her old number. A moment later, I heard her familiar whisper. "Hi, Davy," she said. "Been a while."

"I know! I can't believe I reached you! Listen, this is gonna sound crazy, but okay, I've been doing some thinking, and what I think is, I think we should meet. We should meet up." There was a long pause, the kind of silence you hear when the TV's showing footage of a plane crash or a natural disaster and the anchorman's at a loss for words. "Look," I said. "I just want to meet you in person. I'll come down to Austin or Waco or wherever you live. It's fucking freezing here, anyway."

Another long pause. Then: "You sure you're ready to meet the real me?"

···

Ten days later, I was in Austin. Nicole suggested we get together at an Applebee's off I-35 at the far-north end of town. I pulled into the parking lot at eight; this was one of those grim, anonymous commercial strips where Americans carry out their ordinary lives that appear on MSNBC after, say, a sniper shooting or a child abduction. Nicole knew what I looked like—I'd directed her to my picture on the Found Web site—but I had no idea whom to be looking for other than somebody sitting alone. A weary hostess greeted me: "Table for one?"

"Actually, I'm looking for a friend." I walked past her into the restaurant. The place was mostly empty; on a jumbo-sized TV, the Pro Bowl was on. At a table in the back, gazing at me with an odd smile while sipping a Coke, was a woman who was at least 89 years old. No fucking way. I almost bolted right then. But I'd come 1,500 miles to meet the real Nicole, even if the real Nicole had stumbled off the set of Cocoon. I ambled over and stood above her table. "Nicole?"

"There's no radishes in my soup!" the lady said. "I asked for radishes!"

It wasn't Nicole.

At another table, sitting by himself and halfheartedly watching the game, was a skinny Eminem-looking kid in a white Spurs hoodie who couldn't have been out of high school. I went over to him, squeamish and cringing.

"Yeah?" he said.

"Hi, I'm Davy."

"Okaaa-aay." He looked at me sideways.

Not Nicole. I felt dizzy with relief.

Then I saw her, perched on a red stool at the bar, toying with her cell phone—a curvy Latina maybe 24 years old. No J.Lo, but perhaps a young Rosie Perez. Nice! I felt a little tingle. This was the kind of girl I'd move to Texas for. I wondered if we'd be having sex in my hotel room tonight.

I moved close, and she turned to me with a smile.

"Nicole?"

"No," she said.

"Oh," I said.

What the fuck? Had she stood me up? I turned away and headed out of the restaurant, almost bumping into a guy on his way in. He was black with a shaved head, about 30 years old. We gazed at each other for a long couple of beats. Then slowly, shyly, he raised his hand and gave a little wave.

···

Nicole's real name was Aaron. We went inside and sat in a booth far from everyone. He ordered a Long Island iced tea; I ordered two whiskeys. The world seemed to rattle and buzz. Each steamy moment Nicole and I had shared over the phone flickered through my mind like a porno on fast-forward. But now, in each frame, I had to replace Fiona Apple with this—HOLY FUCK!—this guy. What kind of deranged motherfucker pulls stunts like this? My neck got hot, and I thought about just getting the fuck out Dodge, but after a minute the drinks and Aaron's bashful, slumping presence cooled me down.

Aaron began to explain things. He'd been doing the Nicole voice since he was 13, he told me. His first calls were to a guy at his high school, whom he had a crush on. Over the years, he'd had dozens of relationships with the general trajectory as ours: heated phone sex gradually evolving into a deeper friendship, then, after three weeks or three years, an inevitable flameout.

But how had he come to find me that night at the Motel 6? Was he staying in another room and saw my TV on?

"No, I was at home," Aaron said. "There's five Motel 6s in Austin; I have all their phone numbers memorized." These motels were somewhat unique, he said: Calls don't go through the front desk; they're handled by an automated system that asks for a room number. Many nights, after the clubs had closed, he'd be bored and drunk and start dialing random rooms. If a girl answered, he'd hang up—Aaron was gay; he didn't want to talk to girls. If a guy answered and he sounded nice, "Nicole" would start whispering.

He had dated—by phone—cops, businessmen, students, even a butcher and a baker (truly, but no candlestick maker). "I always want to be able to reach someone when I'm in the mood," he said. "So I like to have two or three things going at any one time."

"You mean all that time you were cheating on me?" I said in mock horror. "Whispering to other guys?"

He laughed—a squeaky girlish laugh. I could see how I'd mistaken him over the phone as female. Still, there'd been times when I'd suspected Nicole was a guy and had gone ahead with the sex anyway. Did that mean I was gay? Nah, not really. Each time we'd talked, at least during sex, I'd been able to convince myself that Nicole was female. My powers of self-deception were perhaps mightier than I'd realized, but I wasn't going to have to reexamine my own sexuality.

Aaron revealed more. I wasn't a very adventurous phone-sex partner. Spanking, domination—sometimes his calls veered into these territories. As Nicole, he'd led guys into the shower and had them pee on themselves. Once, he'd arranged to have a guy fuck his wife while he listened, without the wife knowing. All of this information was dispensed with the sheepish amusement and reluctant pride of a criminal reflecting on his work at the end of a spree.

Did he think Nicole's phone buddies know she was a guy? Some knew, he figured, but chose to ignore it. Others had no clue. A few guys had become so obsessed with Nicole that they'd proposed marriage. One even promised to leave his wife for her. "That's when I have to tell them the truth," Aaron said. "I feel bad for deceiving them for so long. It can be really heart-wrenching, because I might have feelings for them, too, but I have to tell 'em, 'Look, I'm a guy.'" There'd been shock, anger, promises of a beating. A lawyer he'd been screwing over the phone for a year called him a fucking faggot, slammed down the phone, and then, hours later, called back, confessed he'd had fantasies about guys, and asked to meet up. They ended up having sex at Aaron's apartment. A half-dozen times, he said, he'd hooked up with guys he'd met as Nicole. All of them claimed to be straight, only curious.

I still couldn't understand the allure of all of this. Aaron was a handsome guy, fit, with kind eyes. I knew from months of calls that he was a sweet soul and bighearted. Why didn't he find himself a boyfriend?

"I had a bona fide boyfriend once," he said. "A few years ago. I was so in love. But then he took off." Aaron looked down. "It's hard in the gay community. People are not faithful. It's hard to find someone who wants to be committed and serious."

That sounded like a cop-out to me; plenty of my gay friends had managed to find long-term partners.

"Maybe I'm in the wrong scene," Aaron said. "Guys at the clubs, they don't want what I want." Over the phone, he could get to know someone as a person first. It wasn't all about looks. "Sometimes," he said, "you can express yourself better with a stranger."

I asked about his mom—had she known he was gay? "We never had 'the conversation,'" he said, "but I think she suspected. Didn't matter. She loved me no matter what."

"She passed away in 2004?"

Aaron paused, "1999."

"Oh, my bad." I said. "For some reason, I thought it was more recent."

"Yeah," he said. "I lie about that. I always want to talk about her with people, but I think they'll think I'm weird if they know it's been seven years and I can't get over it."

I ordered us another round of drinks.

Aaron drifted from one story about his mom into another, and gradually his double life as Nicole began to make sense to me. Here was a guy still grieving over the loss of his mother, crushed from a broken relationship, and surrounded by death at his job—no wonder getting involved with people felt harrowing. As Nicole, it seemed, he managed to get his rocks off without risking true intimacy. I could only applaud his innovation, thought it struck me as awfully lonely.

The Pro Bowl had ended, and Applebee's was clearing out. I paid the bill, and we made our way out to the parking lot. A gloomy mist had settled in; the wet pavement had a dull shine.

"How 'bout a hug?" I said.

He smelled of musky cologne, salt, and beer, like a football stadium after the stands empty out.

"See ya around," Aaron said, though he knew I was flying back to Detroit the next morning.

"Yeah. See you around."

We got in our cars and rolled out of the lot, both headed for the I-35 South ramp. On the freeway, we drove side by side for a half-minute like two truckers. I saw Aaron playing with his phone, and then my phone buzzed—he'd sent me a text message: WANNA TRY A GUY?

I looked across at him, shook my head, and held up my hands—sorry, man, nothing I can do.

Aaron gave a little tight-mouthed nod and lifted his hand—the same understated wave when we'd first run into each other. Then he zoomed ahead, and a mile later, at a split in the highway, peeled away. I watched his taillights until at last they disappeared into the foggy, aching Texas night.

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